Ronald Reagan and D-Day

To judge by most of the news reports I’ve seen over the past couple of days, one would think that Ronald Reagan had been a far more universally admired president than he was. But while he was president anyone who was at all left of center politically and culturally viewed him with a hostility ranging from dislike to intense loathing. Most of the people I worked with during the Reagan administration fell somewhere in this group. The one who comes to mind first was the woman who considered him a very personal enemy and literally could not stand to look at him—she told me once that before reading a magazine with Reagan’s picture on the cover she had to tear the cover off and throw it away. I thought this very odd and somewhat amusing, but I developed more sympathy for her when I found myself having similar feelings about Bill Clinton.

Amid the talk about Bush-hating these days I think it’s often glossed over that this kind of polarization has existed with the majority of the presidents of the past few decades: Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Carter, Ford, and Bush Sr. did not, as the saying goes, rise to the level of distinctness which provokes the hatred that these four did. For that matter, it was probably true of FDR, to say nothing of Lincoln, so perhaps we worry too much about it.

Have the people who hated Reagan mellowed toward him, or are they just keeping a tastefully low profile on the occasion of his death? I don’t know, but for my part, I certainly think more highly of him than I did when he left office. Although I voted for him twice, it would be dishonest of me to pretend that I was always a great enthusiast. I had, and to some extent still have, a sense of things so deeply awry in the modern world that I had, and have, only limited hope for what can be accomplished politically, although in 1980 I thought Reagan’s forthright conservatism clearly preferable to Carter’s somewhat sneaky liberalism. (I had voted for Carter in ’76. It seems unlikely that I will ever vote for another Democrat.)

I don’t think I considered it a seriously credible possibility in either 1980 or 1984 that the Soviet Union would collapse before the end of the decade, the Cold War effectively end, and the poised missiles of MAD become less of a threat than they had been for the preceding thirty years. I’m sure historians will argue forever as to whether and in what degree Reagan was really responsible for this, and no doubt it’s an over-simplification to give him all the credit, but surely it would be even more of one to give him no credit. Beyond my crediting him with this accomplishment, I think more highly of him now because evidence in the form of letters and other personal papers, as well as the testimony of those who knew him, has emerged over the past decade or so that reveal him to have been a man of far more substance than either his detractors or even the popular image concocted by his own political campaigns would lead one to believe.

Almost as much as the man himself, Americans seem to be mourning the passing of another link with what very many of us see as a better time, the period before 1960 or so, and especially the years before and during World War II, contradictory though this may seem, considering the troubles of those times. So it seems appropriate that Reagan’s death coincided with celebrations of the anniversary of D-Day. Surely there is a great deal of romantic illusion in this nostalgia, but the fact that it occurs not only in those who can actually remember those times but in those born afterward, sometimes well afterward, must, if it does not prove that the earlier time was wonderful, at least prove that we are not pleased with our own. All over the political spectrum, with the exception perhaps of the radical left, one meets the feeling that something has been lost, and when people try to articulate this they almost always include the word “decency,” a term which in the American vocabulary encompasses a great deal. To say much more than this would require an essay or perhaps a book. But whatever this thing we call decency is, Ronald Reagan seems to have possessed it in great degree—not only apparently, as his detractors would have it, but actually. May he rest in peace, and may we recover decency.